Dated October 07, 2004
Business Standard

IBM India signed a co-operation agreement with premier institutions - Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and IIT Bombay to institute an Open Source Software Resource Centre (OSSRC) in Mumbai.

The OSSRC would be first set up at C-DAC Mumbai. Under the agreement, C-DAC, IIT Bombay and IBM India would jointly undertake activities to further and develop Open Source Software (OSS) activities in India.

Speaking on the occasion, Shanker Annaswamy, managing director IBM India, said: "Globally IBM has been a leading proponent of OSS. And we believe that this initiative would aid us in serving our Indian customers speedily and help us in educating the masses." Over Rs 5 crore would be invested over the next 3 years for the development of the centre. IBM would provide hardware and software resources, support for management and implementation of OSSRC. Red Hat India and Novell Suse are its business partners for this project.

S Ramakrishnan, Former Director General, C-DAC said, "The open source movement had begun twenty years ago while Linux has been in operation for more than a decade. Everybody thought OSS would die but it has proved to be otherwise and has grown strength to strength." C-DAC will focus on developing the necessary skill sets that includes Indian language technologies and frameworks for OSS development. IIT Bombay would help in direction of the OSS efforts that is aimed towards the education sector.

KK Jaswal, the chief guest and secretary, department of information technology, ministry of communications and information technology, government of India, said: "We are committed to leverage the benefits of OSS to solve the real problems of the common man and we hope this combined effort would be the digital bridge across all disparities that exist in our society."

Though OSS has always been looked upon as an affordable solution compared to Microsoft Windows, it is not the only reason.

According to Jaswal,"The need for an OSS does not stem from the affordability aspect alone. Issues such as security, ownership, vendors and creativity of the engineers form important elements as to why we need to adapt OSS."